Google announced back in 2010 it was seeking communities to participate in an experiment involving insanely fast fiber-optic broadband. The plan was called Google Fiber and ultimately Kansas City was chosen. The first homes and businesses with Google Fiber had their 1 Gbps service turned on yesterday.

However, anytime we see internet providers offer theoretical peak speeds, we usually take them with a huge grain of salt. However, it looks like Google Fiber is actually incredibly fast in the real world.

A Google Fiber user named Mike Demarais ran a speed test only minutes after his service went live according to ArsTechnica. He achieved 696.38 Mbps download and an impressive 620.49 Mbps upload.

"The first thing I did was BitTorrent Ubuntu," Demarais said. "I think that took two minutes, let me try it again right now."

The home where Demarais accesses these incredibly fast internet speeds is operated by Homes for Hackers, and is owned by Ben Barreth. Entrepreneurs can live in the house rent and utility free for three months at a time, only needing to pay for their own groceries.

Homes for Hackers is billed as an attempt to kick start high-tech businesses within the city.

Google offers a few different plans for customers. For $120/month you get Gigabit internet (up/down), HDTV service, a Nexus 7 tablet, and 1 TV box. If all you need is gigabit internet, that will only run you $70/month. Google is even offering a "free" internet service (guaranteed for at least 7 years) that provides 5Mb down/1Mb up. However, customers have to pay the $300 "construction fee" that is waived on the two paid packages.

There are no data caps on any of Google's packages (including the "free" one).

quote: I'm saying that the storage isn't the bottle neck. How is that not obvious? I'm also saying that your argument of 200mbps is invalid, because 200mbps is 25MB/s. Almost any harddrive can hit that in a sequential write. This has NOTHING to do with synthetic and everything to do with whether its a random write or not. Downloads are sequential mostly.

And what you're saying is incorrect since you're presenting it as an absolute, while simultaneously demonstrating a general ignorance on this topic. You're original comment was false and your followup is even more erroneous. I've already indicated that downloads are primarily sequential transfers - not sure why you felt the need to repeat that.

Synthetic benchmarks, which you are basing your claims upon, do not necessarily mirror actual "real world" performance. A mechanical hard drive may be able to score big numbers in a benchmark simply because a large portion of the test occurs within the drive's onboard cache. You're seeing the effects of burst transfers elevating the average measured transfer speed of the drive due to the predictable, repetitive nature of the benchmark I/O.

"Many" laptops shipped with budget hard drives that peak around 40-50 MB/s in benchmarks for sequential writes. 30 MB/s as a real world average for 4200-5400 RPM laptop drives is not inaccurate.

The 2.5" Scorpio Black I have benches at over 100 MB/s for sequential writes but copying to or from that laptop over a gigabit network does not result in sustained speeds at 100 MB/s...in fact, aside from the benchmarks I do not see much more than 75 MB/s in any real world applications including something basic like file copying. This experience is consistent with all mechanical drives that I've owned.

quote: Synthetic benchmarks have NOTHING to do with it. Notebook harddrives can easily hit 40-60, even the slow ones. So that's 320-480. A decent notebook drive could go well beyond that.

No, not really. The slow drives are peaking around 35-40 MB/s on a good day. Google is offering 1 Gbps internet. That's 1,000 Mbps or 125 MB/s. A typical FAST notebook hard drive like the WD Scorpio Black can sustain around 75 MB/s which is a little more than half of that, and that drive was not standard fare on the typical $499 laptop that consumers tend to spring for.

I never said that everyone with a mobile device is going to have a problem - but I did say that with 1 Gbps network bandwidth, the throughput of your storage media can potentially become a bottleneck and that is entirely accurate.